Science says if you read Harry Potter, you probably have this one noble trait

Good news for Harry Potter fans. Science just said that those who read the books are better human beings than those who don’t.

According to a new paper published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, “reading the Harry Potter series significantly improved young peoples’ perception of stigmatised groups like immigrants, homosexuals or refugees.”

Ultimately, JK Rowling is to thank for that, as she has taken ideologies from everyday life and applied them to the characters and storylines in her books.

For instance, ‘Mudblood’ is a commonly used term in the novels, as a way to describe non-magic folk. And if you think about it, it could be traced to pretty much any other racially discriminatory slang.

Last year, JK Rowling answered a fan’s question on the topic, saying that, “the expressions ‘pure-blood’, ‘half-blood’ and ‘muggle-born’ have been coined by people to whom these distinctions matter and express their originators’ prejudices.

“As far as somebody like Lucius Malfoy is concerned, for instance, a muggle-born [wizard] is as bad as a muggle. Therefore Harry would be considered only half-wizard because of his mother’s grandparents.”

Rowling said that even with how far-fetched this is, it’s not that far from the truth, this same concept is shown in some of the real charts the Nazis used to show what constituted Aryan or Jewish blood.

“I saw one in the Holocaust Museum in Washington when I had already devised the ‘pure-blood’, ‘half-blood’ and ‘muggle-born’ definitions and was chilled to see that the Nazis used precisely the same warped logic as the Death Eaters,” she said.

“A single Jewish grandparent ‘polluted’ the blood, according to their propaganda.”

So, good news, if you’re a fan of Potter, then you’re probably not a Nazi.

The reason Potterheads are better people is probably because Rowling believes that they were a part of Hogwarts too.

.@m_abs All these people saying they never got their Hogwarts letter: you got the letter. You went to Hogwarts. We were all there together.